|
|
|
|
|
|
|
W.S. Merwin
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry
So I had to listen to all of these morning services, and I was allowed to do drawings and things, and then do what I wanted with a little pad and pencil. And I was fascinated by two things. One of them was the language of the King James version of the Bible -- which was different from the language that we spoke -- the language of the psalms. There was a whole lot of the Bible that I got to know by heart without even thinking about it, and the language of the hymns: "the spacious firmament on high" and "the blue ethereal sky." I didn't know what half of the words meant, thought it was wonderful, you know. It's funny, the way it rhymed, and so I wanted to write that. And my mother read to us, which is very important. She read Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses and she read Tennyson, "The Brook," and a lot of poems like that. And that's wonderful when parents read -- not just stories -- but poems to their children, because the language of poetry is different from the language of prose, and children pick up that language. And if they can pick it up very early, it's really very, very important. They are likely to always love it if they do. I suspect that they really naturally do.
View Interview with W.S. Merwin
View Biography of W.S. Merwin
View Profile of W.S. Merwin
View Photo Gallery of W.S. Merwin
|
|
|
W.S. Merwin
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry
I must have read Robinson Crusoe four or five times and Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island, all of Stevenson. A book called Ship's Monkey about a ship off to Borneo, and books about American Indians. I really taught myself to read because there was a book about Indians with pictures, a lot of pictures of Indians, and it was a children's book, but it had a text at the bottom of each page and I couldn't read the text. So I asked word by word what the words were until I could read the book about the Indians because I wanted to live in a place like the place they lived in, in the woods. So that taught -- it was two things, I mean learning to read, because of a fascination with people who didn't read and write, that's sort of interesting. And realizing that early that I really wanted to live not in a city, but in the forest.
View Interview with W.S. Merwin
View Biography of W.S. Merwin
View Profile of W.S. Merwin
View Photo Gallery of W.S. Merwin
|
|
|
James Michener
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist
And, I am certainly not a stylist in English language, using arcane words and very fanciful construction and so on. There is a great deal I can't do but Boy, I can tell a story. I can get a person, with moderate interest in what I am writing about, and if she or he will stay with me for the first one hundred pages, which are very difficult, and I make them difficult, he will be hooked. He will want to know what's happening on the next story and the next story and the next. That I have. And that's a wonderful gift. That's storytelling. And I prize it. I try to keep it cleaned up. I try to keep it on focus. I am wretched when I fail and feel and sense of terrible defeat.
View Interview with James Michener
View Biography of James Michener
View Profile of James Michener
View Photo Gallery of James Michener
|
| |
